I migrated my work desktop to Windows 7 finally, and am really happy with with it (except for IE8). Anyways, I setup Backup the first week and have been using it for weeks now. I set it up to make a system image of C:\ every night at 3am. This way, if my HD is ever toast, I can simply and easily boot off my restored backup image and everything will be fine again. I would ideally like to move to Hyper-V with nightly snapshots one day even. :) Anyways, the other day, my Win 7 backup got all confused. It began to say there was not sufficient room my my backup location drive (d:\). It is the same size drive as my system drive - 128GB. The drive is only around 60GB now (< 1/2 full) and the image is about the same size on the backup drive. But now all of the sudden Win7 Backup thinks it is full. I formatted it and it still thinks there is not enough room. So I chose another disk which I used a few times for image backup a few months ago - my 512GB external USB SimpleDisk. And on this disk it told me it contained a System partition. NOT IT DOESN'T!! I formatted this and Format told me it is a System disk and prompted me to proceed! So now Win7 is confused! Then I go to make a manual image backup of C:\ and it shows it is including I:\ as well, even though it is now empty. What the heck??

Oh and the latest is now my D:\ is showing as a System drive too!! *shakes head*

Have you tried to system restore to fix your issue? If not, you can try it first. When making a system image you will be given the choice of which drive to store it on depending on what the system image program finds. If there are Windows 7 system files on any particular partition it will automatically be selected for the image backup and be excluded as a destination for the backup. It may also be that if a non system partition with no system files is marked as "active" the system imaging program may mistakenly take it for a system partition and include it in the backup so it can't be used as a destination device. I hope this helps.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------John

No way, too much else will be lost. I would have to go way back too likely.

Can you let us know how did you format your external hard drive?Have you checked your hard drives' state in the Disk Manager? You can click Start, and input Diskmgmt.msc in start search, then press Enter to open the Disk Manager, then you should know the state of your hard drive. If your non system partition with no system files is marked as "active", the backup program may mistakenly recongize it as a system partition and include it in the backups. In that case, they can't be used as a destination device.Base on your current situation, you can try System Restore to restore your machine before this trouble happeded. As System Restore helps you restore your computer's system files to an earlier point in time. It's a way to undo system changes to your computer without affecting your personal files, such as email, documents, or photos. I hope this can help you. John

Ok, yes, it is marked Active Primary, although it should not be. Ditto with my SimpleDrive, doh! How do I make them non-active? My C:\ is the only system drive and it is marked System/Boot/Active/Page File/Primary/Crash) Thanks!

Hi,If you want to change change the Active partition to inactive, you can try the following steps:1. Open an elevated cmd prompt, and run the following commands, please press Enter after each command:diskpartList volumeSelect disk 1 /I assume the disk 1 point to your external hard drive./Select volume x /X is the partition number of external hard drive marked as active/inactive2. Refresh your disk management screen to ensure the correct partition was changed. After that, you can try to make backup on this hard drive again.Good luck!John

Hi John, thanks for the replies and info - I will try this but before I do, I just want to make sure this doesn't really hose things. For example, I don't want to change my bootable sector or anything you know what I mean??? I have the following which you should be aware of: C:\ and D:\ on same disk, equal 128GB partitions - I had been using D:\ as a mirror of C:\ H:\ SimpleDrive USB disk 500GB - Also had been making System Image of C:\ to here. I'm not worried about the H:\ but I am worried about mucking with the D:\ as I don't want to break my C:\ you know what I mean?? :)